“La (des)memoria, el amor y el poder del duelo en La multitud errante y Hot sur, de Laura Restrepo”

The narrative of Laura Restrepo brings us closer to the paradoxical character of incarnated traumatic memory: it is characterized by oblivion -Siete por Tres (La multitud errante, 2001) and María Paz (Hot sur, 2012) are incapable of providing us with a coherent narrative of the traumatic facts. And yet, at the same time, it is marked by symptomatic acts of remembering, as both protagonists cannot fail to recollect and describe, over and over again, the beloved persons they have lost. In this way, literature shows us the nature of trauma through its omissions, repetitions and bodily reactions, that is, through the unspeakable, which constitutes the latent center of both novels. Likewise, the vision of love, created by Restrepo, coincides with the theoretical model of Julia Kristeva; the Colombian writer and the Bulgarian thinker, using different languages and modes of expression, seem to tell us that love provides the foundation for fragmentary subjectivities and meanings to emerge, as well as a link between the word and the affect, capable of facing the traumatic events.